The process of financial globalization has given rise to an increase in the frequency of financial crises. With it, there has also been a surge in research about financial crises. One of the key questions in this area is whether crises are triggered by fundamentals or come as a result of panic. Observing real-world events, many prominent researchers, including Friedman and Schwartz (1963) and K...

This paper develops a tractable macroeconomic model with a banking sector in which banks face endogenous borrowing constraints. There is no uncertainty about economic fundamentals. Banking bubbles can emerge through a positive feedback loop mechanism. Changes in household confidence can cause the bubbles to burst, resulting in a financial crisis. Credit policy can mitigate economic downturns. T...

In this paper we provide a theory of money markets and private money. We show that preserving symmetric ignorance in liquidity provision is welfare maximizing and strictly dominates symmetric or even perfect information. A key property for the functioning of money markets is when agents have no need to ask questions and no incentive to produce private information about the value of the security...

We study the use of fines and inspections to control production activities that create external damages. The model contains a continuum of firms, differing in their compliance costs, so that only high-cost firms evade the regulations. Modifying the usual Pigou rule for taxing externalities to account for costly inspections, the external damage from the marginal evader’s activities should exceed...

hile the term “the Great Recession” has been loosely applied to almost every economic downturn in the past twenty years, the crisis of 2007-09 has—more than most recessions—lived up to that name. The crisis has been felt across virtually all economic sectors and in all parts of the world. Still, if its effects have been widespread, its origins were narrower: the crisis had its roots in the fina...

In spite of large number of financial crises, often depicted as episodes of financial panic, the notion of panic in financial markets is not very well understood. Many have argued that in order to understand financial crises, and in particular panic events, we need to go beyond classic economic arguments. This paper is an effort in that direction, in which we attempt to give a psychological acc...

In this paper we give an academic assessment of the financial crisis (crises) from our point of view and discuss where quantitative risk management went wrong. We formulate four mathematical theorems/research areas which have relevance for financial crises in general where the underlying theme is model uncertainty. Related to these theorems, key issues that will be discussed are: financial alch...

We study the behavior of credit and output across a financial crisis cycle using information from credit spreads. We show the transition into a crisis occurs with a large increase in credit spreads, indicating that crises involve a dramatic shift in expectations and are a surprise. The severity of the subsequent crisis can be forecast by the size of credit losses (change in spreads) coupled wit...